The subject of this week’s offering is the emerging story of the at least $1 billion fraud perpetrated by Somali immigrants in Minnesota.  The piece concerns Minnesota Congresswoman, and insufferable Squad member, Ilhan Omar.  Its title is a reference to the legend of Omar the Tent Maker.

The Omar legend is a story unto itself.  It originated with a 1922 silent film sporting that title.  The film was a biography of Persian poet and mathematician Omar Kayam.  However, the legend that made Omar the Tent Maker a household name was far less literary.

The popular notion of Omar the Tent Maker was that, when Arabs stopped living as nomads and moved into houses, Omar no longer had a market for his tents, so he adapted his products from tents to dresses for big-boned women.

This may have been insulting, but it was damned funny.  I know this is true because during my childhood, scarcely a week went by that my father didn’t suggest that some big person got his or her clothing from Omar the Tent Maker.  And it wasn’t just him.  It must have been a generational reference, because a contemporary of my father, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, actually referred to Omar the Tent Maker in one of his memorable First Amendment opinions.  But I digress.

For some reason passing understanding, Minnesota is home to more than 100,000 Somali immigrants to the U.S.  The Somalis were admitted to the country by Il Duce Obama.  Remember the furor over the 2018 Donald Trump comment about why we let in people from “shithole countries?”  He had Haiti in mind, but Somalia is an equally repugnant shithole, from which we shouldn’t have taken immigrants.

The average income in Somalia is less than $2 a day.  Somalis are poorly educated, and lack proper sanitation.  The one thing they do really well is procreate.  More than half the population of Somalia is under age 15.  They also lack a functioning government.  The government collapsed after a civil war in 1991, to be replaced by local warlords and criminals.  This is the cancer that Obama imported into our country.

According to NPR, the large block of Somalis gravitated to Minnesota because  Minnesota is known for its “hospitality.”  And they have taken full advantage of Minnesota hospitality, as about 75% of them are receiving welfare benefits.

But the Somalis are enterprising people.  The current fraud investigation makes that abundantly clear.  During the Wuhan pandemic, the U.S. went on a well-meaning, yet ruinous spending spree that increased federal spending by some $2 trillion a year.  All manner of new social welfare programs sprung up, and apparently, nobody in the government was looking.  Enterprising Minnesota Somalis went to work.  Ilhan Omar, in perhaps her only legislative accomplishment, sponsored the bill that funded the fraud, and she appeared in a video promoting this “nonprofit” program.

So far, prosecutors have found that $1 billion was stolen, of which only $50 million has been recovered.  The largest scandal is the Feeding Our Future case, where approximately $300 million intended to feed low-income children during the pandemic was siphoned away in what federal prosecutors describe as the largest pandemic-relief fraud scheme charged in U.S. history.  Most of the shell companies and meal sites were operated by Somali Minnesotans.

That’s right, not all the fraudsters were Somali.  Just 79 of the 87 defendants charged to date.  The fraudsters claimed to have served 91 million meals, for which they fraudulently received nearly $250 million in federal funds, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota.

Some of the money was distributed to Safari Restaurant to provide meals to schoolchildren.  The restaurant’s owner, Salim Ahmed Said, provided no meals, and just pocketed that cash.  Ilhan Omar held her 2018 congressional victory party at Safari Restaurant.  Just a coincidence, I’m sure.  One witness has claimed that Said disclosed a gang affiliation and threatened to kill him if he reported the fraud to authorities.

Instead of feeding children, Said used the funds to buy a $2 million Minneapolis mansion and a $9,000-per-month shopping spree at Nordstrom.  Other participants in the scheme spent your money on luxury cars, lavish lifestyles and purchasing property in various places from Minnesota to Kenya. (Kenya borders Somalia.  Even the Somalis know better than to return from whence they came).

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is taking heat for failing to stop the fraud, but in fairness, in 2021 the Minnesota Department of Education grew suspicious and tried to stop Feeding Our Future funding.  Proving they have assimilated into the U.S., the fraudsters sued, alleging racial discrimination.  A judge ordered the state to restart reimbursements, enabling the scheme to escalate.

Another Somali engineered scheme defrauded the Minnesota autism-treatment program of millions of dollars.  One scammer, Asha Farhan Hassan, had  pocketed about $465,000 from the Feeding Our Future fraud, but that was just pocket change.  Hassan billed Medicaid for fake therapy sessions, used untrained staff and paid parents $300 to $1,500 a month to keep their kids in the program.  She sent hundreds of thousands of dollars abroad, including to purchase real estate.  The autism program’s budget jumped from $3 million in 2018 to nearly $400 million in 2023.  Autistic kids got no treatment.  The taxpayers got screwed.

The scale of program growth stunned federal officials, who are still uncovering new schemes.  The Housing Stabilization Services program was projected to cost $2.6 million annually but paid out more than $100 million last year. Where did all the money go?  Well, in addition to spreading the graft around the Minneapolis Somali community, it looks like substantial sums were sent back to Somalia, reportedly diverted to the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab.  A House investigation and a Treasury Department probe are underway.

Was Representative Ilhan Omar involved in the frauds.  There’s no hard evidence of that yet.  But she has proven herself to be a more successful investor that even Nancy Pelosi.  When she was first elected to Congress in 2018, she reported a negative net worth, and her 2023 filing showed a net worth of about $65,000.  According to a financial disclosure statement filed this May, her net worth, combined with her husband’s assets, spiked to $30 million, a 46,000% increase.

This is circumstantial evidence, to be sure, but as my late father-in-law was fond of saying, “Nobody gets that kind of money quickly by working for it.”  For her part, Ilhan Omar denies any involvement.  She attributes the fraud to a lack of federal guardrails monitoring the COVID-19 money.  On the subject of money being sent overseas to fund terrorism, she said, “There are people who have been prosecuted, and who have been sentenced.  If there was a linkage in that the money they have stolen going to terrorism, that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out.”

In other words, you stupid Americans made it easy for us to steal the money, and if you can’t figure out where we stashed it, shame on you.  Omar played the race card, painting Minnesota Somalis as the victims of the frauds.

So is Ilhan just an ignorant dupe, or is she Omar the Fraud Maker?  Decide for yourself.